The Academy and its affiliated program PROGRESS, are the first of their kind to not only teach women negotiation, but to "look at critical leadership skills through a negotiation lens."

Because the Heinz Academy and PROGRESS are initiatives of the School of Public Policy at Heinz College, I've been thinking not only about the way negotiation skills enhance women's leadership ability but also the ways in which negotiation skills can be used to power social, cultural and political change.

Frankly, my posts last week about women's advancement needing a grass roots, bottom up movement - an idea Maureen Dowd raised this weekend in Pom Pom Girl for Feminism - are the result of my struggle to answer the question implicitly raised by PROGRESS - how can we change the workplace for women through the lens of negotiation?

In contemporary conflicts, as much as 90 percent of casualties are among civilians, most of whom are women and children.Women in war-torn societies can face specific and devastating forms of sexual violence, which are sometimes deployed systematically to achieve military or political objectives. Women are the first to be affected by infrastructure breakdown, as they struggle to keep families together and care for the wounded.

A commenter immediately challenged the post with this indisputable fact - you never see dead women on the battlefield.

Quite right.

And that's a framing problem.

War, covered primarily by male journalists, focuses on the battlefield and battlefield carnage. It does not focus on the death and victimization of women and children. The frame for war is the battle. It is not the "collateral damage." And note the use of the term "collateral damage" to explain the rape of women and the death of women and their children.

Though Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature claims war is being de-valorized in the Western world, we can't seem to help making it an heroic struggle of right vs. wrong and good vs. evil. If the narrative of war includes rape, heroism suffers.